


through a glass, darkly

by lordbirthdayxv



Series: Undernourished Egos [1]
Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Getting Back Together, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:46:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27553288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lordbirthdayxv/pseuds/lordbirthdayxv
Summary: Love, lack, and two people increasingly unable to feel anything but mutual disdain.
Relationships: Im Changkyun | I.M/Yoo Kihyun
Series: Undernourished Egos [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2116836
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	through a glass, darkly

When things stop looking like they once did and you question the integrity of your eyes and mind, it is best to move houses, so that’s what they do. 

For a long time, Kihyun would curse Changkyun for buying a house in the country. _All it does_ , he would say, _is drive me insane_. And years ago, it would have been nice to want to go insane together because that was how they loved and wanted to live. Except now, his words carry the dust of long years that flakes off and settles where he parts his hair each morning. 

Changkyun understands. He always does and it makes Kihyun want to scream because that is not how things are supposed to be anymore. New house, new pain, new Changkyun but Changkyun is the same and it is not comforting at all. He had always been that way, the kind of person that was not really a person but an immovable piece of heavy furniture that sat in a corner and regarded Kihyun with misty, dull eyes and said only the most inane things for the sake of saying something.

Kihyun thinks, despite everything, that the house is nothing if not just because it makes Changkyun as unhappy as it makes him and that is mildly comforting. They tell themselves every day that they would come to love it here. Each of them has decrepitude spreading like black mold through their bodies. They see the sickness in each other and never talk of it out of disgust, and slowly it pushes them to a place on the very edges of the world but that isn’t too far because the house _is_ their world.

The house knew in its heart that it was blameless. It was a box of mortar and cement. And yet both of them dole out their own special punishment to its walls and its rooms and the things they put inside of it, including themselves. The house was reduced to watching, silent in its misery as all of them slowly began coming apart at the seams.

Funnily enough, it is Changkyun who makes the suggestion. 

_I think we need space_ and Kihyun almost sneers at him because how characteristic of Changkyun to state the obvious when it has drained every drop from the walls of their home, leaving behind only silences that stretch endlessly into space. Instead, he says _yes_ and drives out to the city. It feels liberating, the kind of summer night that teeters between sweat forming a film on one’s face and light breezes lifting hair out of one’s eyes.

Except, it lasts about as long as he is out of sight of the house. He turns on to the highway and it happens, a string of something like longing drawing a circle around his chest until it becomes hard to breathe. But Kihyun is given to compartmentalizing without delay and the more his heart constricts, the faster he drives because there was no way it was going to get him now.

Hours later he is looking into glassy blue eyes set in a noh mask and a paper-thin voice is whispering things it wants him to do. She wants something he can give and so he provides but decides to be cruel about it. To himself? To Changkyun? To the pretty thing in Changkyun’s seat? He doesn’t know but he drives to the house nonetheless and Changkyun is there, a permanent fixture in their impermanent home, but Kihyun doesn’t tell him that. Instead, he walks past the living room and takes the pretty thing to the mausoleum they once called their bedroom.

It gets easier from then on because Changkyun is adept at masquerading as inanimate things and Kihyun is a force of nature bent on breaking everything in its path. The house watches, grey stillness fast becoming it’s most discernible trait, and begins to intervene.

They wake up one morning and there is dust everywhere and it seems to come from every crevice in the house that leads outside. It comes back twice as fast as it is cleaned and eventually they settle for a comfortable arrangement. They would let the dust settle in the house's bones and in turn it would let them choke on it.

Every once in a while, Changkyun buys a knickknack for the already cluttered drawing room like a therapeutic exercise. Kihyun obsessively collects plates and glasses, stacking them all in storage. He knows perfectly well he never intends to use them. They are too clean for the house.

He is in the kitchen when Changkyun visits him there. They have divided the house like pieces of cake and because it is just, it does not allow Kihyun to be anything otherwise. It angers him and he takes it out on Changkyun like all other things.

_Will you stare at me all day?_

A pause.

 _I don’t understand you_ but that’s a lie because Kihyun does understand and he knows Changkyun does too but Kihyun has always been needlessly cruel about the tiniest things. 

Changkyun walks to the table that stands like a river between them and blinks his dull eyes.

_I think you’re confusing me with yourself._

_Love doesn’t make me gentle or kind_ , Kihyun thinks as he regards Changkyun across the ocean, _in fact, it makes me want to hurt you._

He has said the last part out loud because Changkyun is smiling a sleepy smile.

_You can’t hurt me._

Kihyun proves him wrong every day but does not stay to pick up the pieces. 

But Changkyun is content because he has learned the rules of the game far too well to make sloppy mistakes like Kihyun. With the house on his side, he becomes a daywalker as steadily as Kihyun becomes a creature of the night. There is time yet, so when Kihyun prowls the city and stumbles home with pretty things in tow, Changkyun sleeps and establishes dominion over light. He finds it ironic. If what Kihyun says is the truth, which it rarely is because Kihyun is a skilled liar, it should be Changkyun seeking the cover of darkness. _Mouse_ , Kihyun used to call with love sitting on his tongue. Now he says _coward_ as anger crusts like sleep-sand in the corners of his eyes. Changkyun doesn’t mind. He has learned the rules.

So while Kihyun leaves for his nightly hunts, he compiles a list of facts and counterarguments. The facts are these: 

Kihyun is cruel but so am I (Kihyun doesn’t know that).

Kihyun is hurting himself (but Kihyun doesn’t know that).

Kihyun is looking for immovable things (but Kihyun doesn’t know that).

Kihyun will leave (?)

The last one scares him so Changkyun quickly adds to his list:

Kihyun is wind and sand and I am yeardust on his shirt collar.

The fact of the matter is that Changkyun is a martyr and Kihyun is keen on taking him up on that promise, unaware that Changkyun tallies each blow in the ledger bound with their once blue love. This he keeps hidden underneath his pillow for the day Kihyun says the words Changkyun knows he will eventually say. His method is perfect, his evidence empirical. He is ready.

But Kihyun never speaks. Between work and all things besides, he has rolled up his tongue and buried it at the root of his mouth. He doesn’t need it because his hands do the talking for him and nobody he is around wants his words. Changkyun does, but his existence is congruent with speckles of dust in sunlight, so Kihyun pays little attention.  
Changkyun watches, horrified, as Kihyun relinquishes language and breaks more abstract things. He turns to the house and cries until his shoulders shake with the force of the microcosmic quakes of his heartbreak but the house is indifferent now because he too has disappointed it. Equitable and just, it tips the scales and shows Changkyun the imbalance. 

He is punished in a manner most fitting his crime. It takes away his sleep, his art, and his peace of mind. Taunts him with it. Asking, pleading, imploring and threatening him to come back so it could be a giving house again. It wants to stop choking him. 

It wants to be kind to Kihyun too but Kihyun had never liked being pitied so when the house reaches out, he shuns it. He dislikes kindness as much as he has come to dislike faces that aren’t Changkyun's (but neither Kihyun nor Changkyun know that). Instead, he diligently works on erasing everything that can chain his feet to the ground Changkyun walks on. He goes from room to room and leaves angry handprints on walls, a testament to his love, hatred, and fear.

He digs up graves in the old stone floor and leaves them unmarked in case he ever wants to visit because he doesn't want a name to stare back at him from the cesspool of his memories. Graves all over his room, his house, his skin, his body, his eyes, and his walls. He reasons with himself that all he ever wanted was to bury the dead so the dead couldn't bury him and he was so desperately digging holes in the ground that he dug one too deep and was unable to climb out. 

For the first time that day, he asks himself what he is burying.

The house, pockmarked with stone, and weeping for the man in the next room answers _time_. Kihyun, years off his back and love clinging to his eyelashes, doesn’t hear.

Slowly, like water chipping away at rock faces, the house begins to break. Changkyun begins to notice tiny cracks in the walls, cracks that fill up to bursting with sunlight with each dawn and spray the house with stale light. The kitchen is what he is most worried about. Kihyun, angry and hurting, never really recovered enough to do anything with it so Changkyun, with his limited knowledge of interior design and heart full of fear, tries his best to lighten the space up. He adds doors to cabinets, stands for wet dishes and little pepper and salt shakers that, in hindsight, he couldn't really afford after all. _Look at me_ , he says to Kihyun one night, _I’m picking up the slack for you._

Still, the kitchen manages to collect more dust than any part of the house and continues to have dishes scattered about in the morning despite Kihyun having washed them each night before bed. Dishes that look forlorn in the early morning light, as if nobody has lived in the house for years. And in a sense, they never really began living at all. Changkyun puts his hand to a wall and finds no life there. Only drab wallpaper and deathly stillness. 

_There is a tomb in this house_ , he thinks and wonders what died. The answer comes wrapped around a soaked Kihyun through the front door and Changkyun knows it is time because Kihyun is alone and there are grooves like sleep lines in his cheeks that only Changkyun can see. 

_Where were you?_

The question startles Kihyun because he has existed above it for a while now. But he has the precision of a hunter so he quickly chooses an arrow from his quiver of hurtful things.

_Don't pretend it means anything to you._

Here they are again, two kinds of pain on opposite shores and accusations flowing back and forth like water between their eyes. Kihyun hurts because he is used to indifference, Changkyun because he finds mundaneness in cruelty, and in that moment it stretches to a thin thread. Thunder crashes as they continue to refuse to speak and the lights go out. The house sighs, heavy and tired, as it falls into a deep slumber. 

Kihyun moves first, panic squeezing his heart like a drug, and he stumbles forward into Changkyun because where else could he go. It takes all of two seconds and Changkyun marvels at small miracles when his mouth finds Kihyun’s in the darkness like tinder catching a spark. He breathes his anger and abandonment like disease into Kihyun’s lungs as Kihyun’s fingers dig into his skin, keeping him there. In the small hours creeping to dawn, they can both burn but now is not the time. 

Changkyun takes Kihyun’s face in his hands and traces the marks of separation etched into his skin. There are too many. Kihyun kisses him again, printing apologies on his lips but Changkyun doesn’t need them. In the face of what they do to each other, they are worthless anyway. 

_Give me something else._ Hesitation. _What would you like?_

Both of Kihyun’s hands in his, Changkyun presses them to his own chest and whispers _time._

So Kihyun pulls him close and up the stairs they go. Rain falls heavily against the roof still but there is red spilling bloodlike across the horizon. Changkyun, hair clinging in tufts to his wet neck, folds himself into Kihyun’s arms like mist and Kihyun holds him, words and all things necessary sliding with the rain across the surface of his skin. _There is rubble where there was home_ , he says but Changkyun shakes his head. In the rain-washed dawn, he smells like caramel burning in a bushfire. Kihyun brushes the backs of his cold fingers across his skin warm like sleep and kisses him again.

 _Like honey is the sleep of the just_ , says Changkyun because he still believes. The house shifts in its slumber and turns its face away as the sun splays itself across the sky. It rains for hours afterward.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ajghar1)


End file.
